Raf Reymen

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Springen (Jumping) is an absurdist comedy set inside 'Sempa Vivax', an exclusive and highly unusual retirement home housed in a castle.The facility caters specifically to wealthy elderly residents, offering them the unique opportunity to fully realize their wildest, final fantasies and unfulfilled dreams. Under the guidance of the home's eccentric staff, the residents engage in bizarre and extravagant activities, which range from reenacting passionate past romances to staging a simulated atomic war for entertainment.The narrative unfolds through the various subplots of these residents as they navigate their surreal daily lives, attempting to escape the realities of old age and mortality through illusion and play. The story explores the chaotic dynamics between the elderly elite, their families, and the staff members who facilitate their increasingly elaborate delusions.

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The family patriarch Van Paemel is a farmer on baron de Wilde's estate. His mild-mannered son Désire is accidentally shot during a hunting party on the estate and remains an invalid. Eduard, the eldest son, is a member of the socialist workers' movement and involved in strike actions in the city. Against her father's wishes, his daughter Cordule starts an affair with the poacher Masco. His youngest daughter, Romanie, is forced to work as a domestic servant at the castle, where she is seduced by Maurice, the baron's son and heir, and becomes pregnant. When the youngest son Kamiel also has to leave the farm because he is drafted into the army, the lack of workers on Van Paemel's farm becomes critical. As a result, the family is evicted from their home because they cannot pay the rent. Three of the children emigrate to the USA, one becomes a nun and one dies, until only the farmer and his wife remain.

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Lieve is a Belgian woman who marries just as World War II is beginning. When the Germans invade, her husband goes off to fight them, but he swiftly returns home after the invasion succeeds. Later, he decides that the Germans are on the right side of things, and goes off to fight for them on the Eastern Front. Soon afterward, a resistance fighter is stranded on her doorway, and she hides him. The two of them fall in love, and the conflicts and joys of this relationship cause Lieve continued grief well after the end of the war.

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The Mayor of a small Flemish town is determined at all costs to save a unique bird sanctuary from a ruthless businessman who advocates a housing development on the site. The main story, though, centres on a childhood trauma that unites the two men and a dark femme fatale whom one desires and the other attempts to manipulate.

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This historical costume drama is a mini-series on the life of Flemish first-rate Baroque painter Pieter Pauwel Rubens (1577-1640), whose artistic success throughout Europe not only made him a fortune allowing him to stock his Antwerp residence ('Rubenshuis' in Dutch) and a castle at Elewijt, in the countryside nearer Brussels, with numerous fashionable treasures, but also became an ennobled diplomat for the Spanish Hapsburg rulers of the Southern Low Countries (now Belgium), who often traveled, for painting commissions and/or diplomatic missions, to and worked in Italy, France, Spain, all Catholic powers, as well as protestant England and the United Provinces (mainly Holland), also allowing him to meet other prominent contemporaries such as artists. It further covers his marriages to Isabella Brandt and Hélène Fourment.

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An Antwerp journalist finds his daily life increasingly disrupted by unexplained phenomena, such as an authentic letter from 1919 that refers to an event taking place at a much later date. Because these disturbances are consistently linked to the name “Joachim Stiller,” the journalist becomes obsessed with it. The resolution, which is closely tied to his traumatic experiences from the Second World War, takes place with a psychiatrist—and later at an abandoned railway station in an Antwerp suburb. Interwoven with this is a subplot about an Antwerp art dealer who believes he can become rich through a new form of painting. To achieve this, he takes a mentally disabled artist hostage. The narrative also follows various romantic entanglements involving the journalist, which ultimately lead to his happy experience of fatherhood.

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In a surreal, bureaucratically rigid society where ending one’s own life requires an official government permit, depressed florist Stefan Pielek makes the mistake of attempting suicide without the proper paperwork. Under police supervision, he submissively files his official application and closes his shop while waiting for the approval. However, during his aimless wanderings through the city, he meets a young woman who calls herself Ophelia. After falling deeply in love and rediscovering the joy of living, Stefan receives the ultimate bureaucratical blow: his suicide permit is approved, meaning that by law, he no longer exists.

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The peaceful life of a notary’s family is disrupted during the Second World War when several German officers are quartered in their home, holding half a dozen fleeing Jews captive. The local resistance is determined to help the prisoners escape, but it won’t be without struggle. A worthy attempt to illustrate the futility of war, and of racism in particular.

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